"Introverts and Social Software (or How I Learned To Love Large Social Gatherings)": Initial Notes

A few people have pointed it out to me either in person or in text message (hi Sacha!), and it might be useful to throw up some notes and a few questions about my proposed conversation for BarCamp Vancouver (posted in the registry) which I've titled "Introverts and Social Software (or How I Learned To Love Large Social Gatherings)". First off: the title: it's sole value is its cleverness, the parenthetical part not yet being true. Closer to reality would be "how I could learn to love large social gatherings". Roland asked me to consider and report about how to make technical conferences and BarCamp Vancouver in particular more friendly towards introverts, so in that case the original title may still apply. The three problems to solve are probably: 1) noise, 2) large gatherings of strangers, and 3) conversation topics. Noise looks largely unavoidable at unconferences that take place in one large room, so people who want to have conversations will probably have to steal away to somewhere quieter. Large gatherings are almost avoided by design since it's fairly difficult to have conversations with more than a few dozen people at once. (Of the video I saw of Gnomedex, particularly the John Edwards portion, looked like question and answer sessions. Important, and a nice change from lecture-style conferences, but not really a conversation.) The BarCamp I attended in Toronto, despite the noise, had a good setup for conversations, with round tables where people could look at each other while they were speaking. Conversation topics are listed on the wiki, so we introverts who hate small-talk can at least figure out whom or what area of the conference to seek out to have the conversations we want to have. But my idea for a conversation (not a "demonstration" or a "talk" or "discussion") involves how introverts use social software to make meaningful connections in real life. The last part is not trivial: the best social software remains that which gets people away from a computer and face to face with other people. Meetup and Upcoming meet those requirements as well as those gatherings organized ad-hoc using weblogs or other online, public media. Back to the idea. Actually, I say "idea for a conversation" because that's exactly what it is: I have more questions than I do answers: how do introverts use social networking software? Are they successful (and how do they define success)? What are the unanticipated results of such use by introverts, good and bad? Some questions I have answers to but would love to hear others' answers are the following: Are social networking tools just things that introverts use to make some friends (increase from zero) and extroverts use to make more friends (increase from some/many)? My answer: absolutely. Which does lead to a followup question I don't have an answer to: whom does social networking software leave out? Is it a bad thing that, for some, social networking tools are the only way some people can make meaningful new relationships? My answer, a lot fuzzier than above, is no. The idea that you can meet someone that shares an interest online—love being just one of many possible reasons that people seek new connections—is no longer controversial or creepy. People now do it "all the time". In October of last year, frustrated with how social networking software wasn't making the number of people I was meeting increase, I wrote the following in an unpublished half-article: "I tried out 43 People as soon as I got an email saying that someone had met me, and thought it was cool for the first few days, but then suddenly I had the following thought: 'this won't get me laid'." About 4 months later, however, it got me laid. (Actually, the long, true story involves mentioning that 43 People was, at best, tangentially involved, and that Urban Vancouver actually helped set things in motion.) In order to truly succeed as a phenomenon, social networking software has to enable the meeting of people who want to share their lives in meaningful ways in a physical space. Boris, in his del.icio.us links, pointed to Karl Schroeder's speculative piece about Canada's northern communities and online gathering places. Reflecting on the fictional SimCanada, in which one can plug in data and see the relationships between them, we get this exchange: “Why debate public policy,” Nauja had said, “when you can sim it?”Such dismissal of all his decades of back- and front-room politicking was galling to Amaruq. Nauja wasn’t exactly wrong--but he wasn’t right either. There were all sorts of collaborative tools in SimCanada, but what had been best about using it was using it with Nauja. It was being together--a community of two in Nauja’s messy house--that had made the experience worthwhile. In the story, the books in Amaruq's library weren't the reason people gathered there: they were often just the excuse for people to gather and connect. I'm not suggesting we need more excuses to get out of the house, but more and better reasons. Until social networking software makes it easy, we have fewer and worse reasons.